Latin America

Man and superman

Meet the real Hugo Chávez, military caudillo and political televangelist

IN THE eight years since he was first elected Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez has become the most controversial political figure in Latin America. He has also, as Moisés Naím, a former Venezuelan minister who now edits Foreign Policy, points out in his introduction to this biography, bracketed himself with Fidel Castro as one of the very few from the region to have become a household name.

He has achieved this partly through sheer verbal effrontery, as in his badmouthing of George Bush. But Mr Chávez's fame stems, too, from his oil-backed claims to be leading a new revolutionary project of “21st-century socialism” that tears up the nostrums of economic liberalism. His fans see this as a model for the developing world. To his opponents, he is an elected dictator who is destroying his country's democracy and, through reckless public spending and controls on private business, its economy.

So there is already much mythology surrounding Mr Chávez. But the man himself has remained elusive. This highly readable biography, first published in Spanish in Venezuela in late 2004, is not “definitive”. But it is an essential starting point to understanding Mr Chávez, and thus to seeing what lies ahead for his country. Cristina Marcano, a Venezuelan journalist, and Alberto Barrera, her novelist husband, interviewed a number of people who at varying times have been close to Mr Chávez. They also draw on the little-publicised work of other researchers, especially regarding the plotting in which Mr Chávez was involved as an army officer. They offer a scrupulously balanced account of a man whose belligerence has polarised opinion in his country and beyond.

The Hugo Chávez who emerges from their book is a complex and astute populist. He is first and foremost a military man. Born into respectable poverty in the tropical lowlands, he saw the army as a route to advancement—as do so many lower-middle-class provincial youths in Latin America. Once politics had replaced baseball as his primary passion, his heroes would be nationalist military rulers such as Peru's General Juan Velasco and Panama's Omar Torrijos, rather than Mr Castro or Che Guevara. Indeed, Mr Chávez distrusts civilians; in government, he has placed many military officers in civilian jobs.

As a politician Mr Chávez is a cool strategist, though a sometimes reckless tactician. He is a natural showman with the talents of a televangelist. The authors are surely right when they say that the “root of Chávez's power resides in the religious and emotional bond” he has forged with ordinary Venezuelans, especially poorer ones. In the tradition of the televangelist, that bond has survived its creator's metamorphosis from austere crusader against corruption to a man who clearly enjoys power and its perquisites. Nowadays, the book notes, Mr Chávez sports designer clothes and Cartier watches—and a growing personality cult.

This bond has allowed him to pull off the remarkable trick of posing as the leader of the opposition to his own incompetent government. Along with all this goes a certain kookiness: the authors cite several sources who say that Mr Chávez believes himself the reincarnation of Ezequiel Zamora, a 19th-century caudillo, and that he leaves an empty chair at meetings for the spirit of Símon Bolívar, the hero of Venezuela's independence.

Mr Chávez has also enjoyed much luck. He has been underestimated by opponents. He is still in power today because of a massive oil windfall. Had his predecessors benefited from today's oil prices Venezuelans would almost certainly not have abandoned their 40-year experiment with a two-party system in favour of an outsider like Mr Chávez.

The authors have relatively little to say about their subject's economic and social policies. But they are particularly useful in tearing away the mythology surrounding the most controversial episode in Mr Chávez's presidency. In their account of the failed coup that briefly toppled the president in April 2002, they show that the army's commanders rebelled when the president ordered them to repress a vast anti-government demonstration. Those same commanders then recoiled, restoring Mr Chávez to power after a conspiratorial group tried to use the confusion to decree an end to democracy.

In their righteous indignation over this conspiracy, Mr Chávez's acolytes gloss over the fact that their hero himself led a similar failed coup against an elected government ten years before. His intention, we are told, was to set up a military-dominated government which would shoot civilian politicians for corruption.

For this English-language edition, the authors have added a brief postscript to a narrative that stops with their subject's victory in a recall referendum in August 2004. At times their text seems dated. A man previously known “for moving nimbly through the terrain of ideological ambiguity” has in recent months swerved more decisively in the direction of state-socialism and a lifetime presidency. That is already limiting his appeal in Latin America, and among the left in Europe. Mr Chávez's closest allies nowadays are in Iran and Belarus. Mr Naím worries that Mr Chávez has “hit a global nerve that makes him internationally relevant”. Perhaps so, but only so long as Mr Bush is around to hate, and so long as the oil money lasts.